@article { , title = {SC2Net: a novel segmentation-based classification network for detection of COVID-19 in chest X-ray images.}, abstract = {The pandemic of COVID-19 has become a global crisis in public health, which has led to a massive number of deaths and severe economic degradation. To suppress the spread of COVID-19, accurate diagnosis at an early stage is crucial. As the popularly used real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) swab test can be lengthy and inaccurate, chest screening with radiography imaging is still preferred. However, due to limited image data and the difficulty of the early-stage diagnosis, existing models suffer from ineffective feature extraction and poor network convergence and optimisation. To tackle these issues, a segmentation-based COVID-19 classification network, namely SC2Net, is proposed for effective detection of the COVID-19 from chest x-ray (CXR) images. The SC2Net consists of two subnets: a COVID-19 lung segmentation network (CLSeg), and a spatial attention network (SANet). In order to supress the interference from the background, the CLSeg is first applied to segment the lung region from the CXR. The segmented lung region is then fed to the SANet for classification and diagnosis of the COVID-19. As a shallow yet effective classifier, SANet takes the ResNet-18 as the feature extractor and enhances highlevel feature via the proposed spatial attention module. For performance evaluation, the COVIDGR 1.0 dataset is used, which is a high-quality dataset with various severity levels of the COVID-19. Experimental results have shown that, our SC2Net has an average accuracy of 84.23\% and an average F1 score of 81.31\% in detection of COVID-19, outperforming several state-of-the-art approaches.}, doi = {10.1109/JBHI.2022.3177854}, eissn = {2168-2208}, issn = {2168-2194}, issue = {8}, journal = {IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics}, note = {INFO COMPLETE (Now published, checked and updated 16/8/2022 LM; Info of Early Access via IEEExplore alert 26/5/2022 LM) PERMISSION GRANTED (version = AAM; embargo = none; licence = pub's own; SHERPA = https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/id/publication/36844 ) DOCUMENT READY (AAM rec'd ) ADDITIONAL INFO - Contact: Jingchang Ren © 2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.}, pages = {4032-4043}, publicationstatus = {Published}, publisher = {Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)}, url = {https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/1674621}, volume = {26}, keyword = {Environment, Energy & Sustainability, COVID-19, Chest X-ray imaging, SC2Ne, Lung segmentation, ResNet-18, Pulmonary diseases, Lung, Feature extraction, Image segmentation, X-ray imaging, Training}, year = {2022}, author = {Zhao, Huimin and Fang, Zhenyu and Ren, Jinchang and Maclellan, Calum and Xia, Yong and Li, Shuo and Sun, Meijun and Ren, Kevin} }